Range of Motion (6 page)

It’s not a glamorous job, by any means, but it’s a break from the house and a little extra income that I’ve been saving for the kids’ college tuition. I’m the girl Friday: I do a little filing, a little phone-answering, even a little bookkeeping, though that terrifies me. I get to pay bills sometimes; I really like, for some reason, paying the trucking companies. They have solid, reliable-sounding names—
Indianhead, TransAmerica—and I like the associated images I always get: fat guys climbing out of big black trucks named Rita and going in for a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and green beans, leaning back and picking their teeth afterward, satisfied as Romans after a banquet. Or young, slim guys with Elvis sideburns and cowboy boots drinking coffee straight from the thermos and driving far into the night, the only vehicle on the road. I see them cranking up the country-and-western, singing along a little, looking for company on the CB, watching the night-softened horizon out the left-hand window like a miles-long floor show. I understand there’s a fair number of female truckers now, and sometimes I get a notion that in another life, that would have been the job for me. Just keep moving, you know. Socialization at the counters of the restaurants. “Okay, June, how about some of those blueberry cakes?” I’d ask the waitress I knew pretty well just outside Toledo. Her with her forty-year-old ponytail, her fading sexiness, nice mole above her upper lip. “How’s the ride today, Lainey?” she’d ask, wiping down the counter beside me after she delivered my order. “Hear you just come out of some heavy rain.”

“Yeah, it was going pretty good there for a while,” I’d say. My king-sized windshield wipers would have been thunking out a heavy rhythm that was still in my brain. June would tell me about the P.I.E. guy she had a one-nighter with and I’d say, Now June that’s dangerous for your body and your spirit
and she’d say, Oh, she knew that, but what the hell, he untied her apron when she poured his coffee and smiled up at her with those dimples—Lord! What was she supposed to do? Sit home alone in her bathrobe looking at reruns? Not this girl. She wasn’t the stay-at-home type, not yet. She’d make a giddy-up sound, wink at me, then go to pick up the order for chicken-fried steak the cook in the back was yelling about. “Aw, hold your horses, Mikey,” she’d say. “Settle down back there, you’re gonna blow a gasket.”

I called work a few days ago to say I still couldn’t come in and Frank said that was perfectly all right, not to worry; he said they had a temporary worker, driving Dolly nuts with her gum-chewing, but otherwise doing just fine. I should take my time, come back whenever I was ready. And … how was he?

“Oh,” I’d said. “No change.”

“I’m so s-s-s-s-s-s-s … regretful,” Frank said.

“Thank you,” I said. The sound of his voice made me wish so hard to be sitting there at my desk, making out the grocery list before I left for home and a normal evening, like I used to.

M
onday evening, the setting sun coloring the clouds pink as cotton candy. The kids and I are on the way to see him. We’ve brought offerings: from Amy, a drawing of stick-fingered, smiling people, a family lined up outside a house with heart-shaped window boxes. The woman wears a blue triangular skirt, the man rectangular brown pants. There are two little children, a boy and a girl, dressed identically to their parents. Sarah has made a tape of herself reading some of
The Secret Garden
, her current favorite. I have brought an embroidered pillowcase that my grandmother did years ago, and Jay’s Weejuns, and some apple crisp which I know he can’t eat but which I want to heat up in the microwave and put under his nose. I’m a little nervous. I’ve prepared the girls for the patients in the nursing home, but they still might stand stock-still when we walk in, stare at one of the residents, feel fear knocking about inside them. Maybe they’ll sit down on the floor and say, “No!” like when they were toddlers and didn’t want to put their jackets on.

“He has his own room,” I say now, looking in the rearview mirror at the two of them sitting together in the back seat. Usually they fight over the front seat, but tonight they both wanted to sit back there.

“You already said,” Sarah says.

“Oh. Yes. I did. Right.”

“Look!” Amy says, pointing out the window. “Dairy Queen! Can we bring him some ice cream?”

“He can’t eat it, honey.”

“Well, you’re bringing him apple crisp.”

“Yes, but for the smell.”

“Ice cream has a smell. He likes Dairy Queen the best. Butterscotch sundae. That has a smell.”

I turn on the blinker. Fine. I’ll go back, get him a sundae. We can put it on top of the apple crisp. It’s sort of crazy, but I’m starting to get excited. “Ice cream woke him up?” Alice will say. “
Yes!
” I’ll answer. “And you know, it was Amy who suggested it, and I almost didn’t stop!”

There is no one in the hall when we go into the nursing home. It is eerily quiet. “Is anyone here?” Sarah asks. “Is this the right place?”

And then, as though on cue, we hear the thin, high sound of an old woman’s voice. I believe she is crying, but it is the thin, wailing variety, sorrow that expects no answer to its request, no relief.

“What’s
that
?” Amy asks, stopping in her tracks. This is what I was afraid of. They will see all the human misery and it will kill them that their father is here.

“It’s just one of the patients,” I say. Actually I’m pretty sure I know who it is. “That’s Mrs. Eliot. She’s really, really old and sometimes she gets upset and cries but then the nurses go in and she stops right away.” Not quite true, but a necessary lie at this time.

“Oh.” Amy starts walking again. “I thought it was a ghost.”

“There are no ghosts,” I say. “You know that.”

“Well, my word,” she says in my head. “Deny me twice more, why don’t you?”

“Here’s his room,” I say, outside Jay’s door. “Are you ready?”

They nod, together.

I push open the door. He is on his side, pillows at his back to hold him over. He is turned away from us. “It’s me, Jay,” I call out. “And Amy and Sarah are here, too.” I have the absurdly hopeful thought that he will say, “Oh, well in
that
case!” and sit up, fling the pillows aside, ask for a drink of water, and then, a little embarrassed, push at the pieces of hair that stick out from the side of his head. He will feel something weird, lift up the sheet a little, look down at the catheter in his penis and say, “What the hell is this, Lainey? Go see if you can get someone to get this thing off me.” And I will say, “You girls stay here with Dad. I’m going to go tell them he’s awake.” And then, “See?” I will say. “You see?”

Of course Jay doesn’t do that. His door swings closed behind us, and we walk slowly around to the other side of the bed, stare at him. His eyelashes are so long and beautiful. The kids got them. Sarah is hanging back against the wall, but Amy goes up to Jay, touches his hand, says softly in her breathy child’s voice, “Hi, Daddy.”

Then, looking up at me, “Can he really hear me?”

I nod.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says again, a little louder. “I brought you a drawing. Of a family.”

“Is he cold?” Sarah asks.

“No, I’m sure he’s fine,” I say. “He has a blanket on, see?”

“No, I mean, his hand. Is his hand cold?”

“No,” Amy says. “Here. Feel it.” She steps aside and Sarah comes forward, reaches her small hand through the bars. At first, it lies across his; then she slides her fingers into the familiar pocket of his palm. She takes a big breath in, sighs out. Then, “Mom? Can we be with him by ourselves?”

“You mean … you want to be alone with him?”

“Yeah. Right, Amy?”

“Yeah!” she says. And then, “… I guess so.”

“All right,” I say, and I have to think very hard about whether or not to add, “Don’t hurt him.” I decide not to. I decide to just stay close. Who knows what made Sarah ask for this? It is so mysterious, I feel I ought to honor it. I get the apple crisp and the ice cream to take with me. The room with the microwave is right next door. I’ll be able to hear if anything goes wrong.

I put a paper towel on the bottom of the microwave, really, the thing is filthy, they should clean it. Maybe I’ll clean it. I set the timer for a minute and a half, lean against the counter far away from the thing so I’m safe from whatever a microwave does to you, I forget exactly what it is.
Who can keep up with what we’ve done to ourselves, the invisible dangers in a normal day wrought by overactive technology, fueled by greed. Soon we’ll have a whole world meeting for the purpose of saying, “Oops. What should we do?”

Just as the timer rings, a man comes into the kitchen. We startle each other, my hand goes flying up to my throat. This is something I’ve done involuntarily since I was a little girl: I get scared, my hand goes to my throat and I squeeze it a little. The more frightened I am, the harder I squeeze. One of these days I’m going to strangle myself.

“I’m sorry,” the man says. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.” He’s very handsome, dark hair and eyes, tall; vaguely reminiscent of someone famous, though I can’t think who. He’s wearing a beautiful sweater. Expensive, you can tell.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m done. I was just heating something up.” I take the apple crisp out, pour the nearly melted ice cream over it.

“Boy, that smells great,” the man says, and I must admit he is right. I put extra butter and spices in with the apples.

“Is that for …”

“It’s for my husband,” I say. “Not that he can eat it. He’s … well, he’s in a coma.” I smile, ridiculously. “I just wanted his room to smell nice. You know. Well, actually, I hoped the smell would get through to him, somehow.” It drives Jay crazy, the way I do this, the way I am always giving more information than I have to. Say I stop at a tollbooth
and ask directions. I can’t just say, “How do you get to Route 3A?” I have to say, “Hi. We’re going to visit a friend who used to be our neighbor and we got caught in traffic a while back so we’re running late, and we’d like to find the fastest way to get there and another friend of mine told me 3A is actually better than the highway. But he’s not the most reliable source. You know. So I thought I’d better check.” Jay says, Don’t give more information than people need to know. But I always do anyway.

“He’s in a coma?” the man in the kitchen with me asks now.

I look down. “Yes, well …”

“My wife is in a coma, too.”

I look up quickly, wonder if this is a terrible, terrible joke, see that it is not. Oh, it is not.

He shrugs. “Small world, huh?”

I nod. I feel a little sick.

“There’s three people here in comas,” the man says. “The other one, lady called Mrs. McGovern, she’s in her eighties. Stroke. Jeannie, my wife, she’s …” He swallows against his pain. “She’s thirty-three.” He nods, pushes his hands into his pockets. There, in his balled-up fists, is his aching heart.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Of course I understand completely what you’re going through. How long?”

He looks away, thinks. “Six months. God. I’d forgotten.”

Six months! “Three for me.”

He nods again.

“How did she …”

“Aneurysm,” the man says. “She came into the living room after dinner one night, holding her forehead, and she sat down and she had this strange look on her face. She said she had a real bad headache. After just a few minutes, it was much worse and she said maybe we should call a doctor. So I took her to the emergency room and they admitted her to the hospital right away, they were going to do surgery the next day. During the night she lost consciousness. They did the surgery but she never … she hasn’t woken up yet. She hemorrhaged in the OR, she arrested a few times …” He looks away, then back at me.

“I’m Lainey Berman,” I say, finally.

“Ted Nichols.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Me too. For you, I mean.”

“Thank you. Listen, I have to get back to my children. They’re with their father. I don’t want to leave them alone too long.”

“Right. Well, we’re in 222.”

“203.” I smile, back out of the room.

Out into the hall, I stand still for a minute, try to take in what I’ve just heard. Down at the other end of the hall, I see Flozell wheeling along behind a woman who is painstakingly taking herself for a ride in her wheelchair. “Get along now, Mary,” he is saying. Well, actually kind of yelling. “I got to go faster than this. Let me by.”

“I certainly will not,” the old lady says, barely turning around. She is dressed in a brown-and-white polka-dot housedress and blue plastic slippers, nylons rolled to the knee. Her thin white hair is neatly styled into a French twist. She is wearing huge clip-on earrings, a pearl-and-rhinestone arrangement. The left one hangs down too low, nearly off her ear. “You can just wait for me,” she says. Then, in a lower voice, but one he can still hear, “I declare, you are the rudest man I have ever met.”

Flozell sees the apple crisp in my hand, stops before me. “What’d you bring me, darlin’?”

I ignore him, start to walk away. A nurse comes up to him, sullenly offers him a cup of pills. “I have been looking everywhere for you, Flozell,” she says. “You know when it’s time for your medication. I’d appreciate it if you would stay in your room at those times. I can’t be running all over the place looking for you. I have too much to do. You ought to know that.”

“Lord, listen to you run on at the mouth,” he says, snatching the pills from her, upending the cup over his mouth, swallowing them without water. “Run on at the
mouth
! I guess every woman in this place done got her period at the same time. You
all
cranky! Oowee! Man could
drown
in the female hormones ’round here, you girls vicious!”

“You hush up!” Mary says, then wheels herself serenely around the corner.

When I push open the door to Jay’s room, I see Amy and Sarah stretched out on his bed, one on either side of him.
They have removed their shoes; I see them neatly lined up on the floor by the dresser. On the outside I smile at this deeply familiar sight of him, a daughter on each side as though she grows there; and on the inside my heart breaks in half, one side falling neatly away from the other. I do things to help, and they hurt. I do things to hurt, and they help.